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Is Sarah Lucas the indispensable artist of the #MeToo Movement? Is her work even more important in this epic feminist uprising? Are we projecting our feelings onto her art?

It really doesn’t matter.

When you look at a work of Lucas’, or step into a gallery rife with her erect candor and exhaustive wit, it’s tough to pin down and articulate your feelings. Her art doesn’t demand anything specific of you. You are not supposed to feel one way or another. Shrewd photography, provocative sculptures, and stark self-portraits are dominated by a gaze reminiscent of the old male kingdom: here, expectations are akin to child’s play. A stained mattress bearing a chicken carcass that looks like it was the victim of a bestial sex crime, an eight-foot-tall pair of concrete stiletto boots, a portrait of the artist in a T-shirt blazoned with the words “SELFISH IN BED”.

Au Naturel

I think making dicks out of things is funny until you’re a certain age. —C

I carried photos of several of Lucas’ work around with me for weeks and collected interviews with people to glean reactions to her work—family, friends, strangers. Quotes from those interviews are sprinkled throughout this piece. Two people asked me if it was a Rorschach test. (Nope.)

Massimiliano Gioni in ArtPress n°321 recalled a moment when Lucas responded to a male interviewer who called her work pessimistic: “Let me ask you something,” she said. “Could it be that my sculptures make you feel so pessimistic because you’re a man? Do you feel them to be directed at you personally? What kind of man would you say you are?”

I think they’re making fun of [penises]. It’s mocking. Which is fair. —E

Food replaces body parts—eggs (or lemons or melons or lightbulbs) for breasts, kebab for a vagina, cucumber for a penis, oranges for testes. A bucket for a pussy. One sculpture is a lifelike, eleven-foot-long penis atop a pedestal of compacted car scraps, set before a wall plastered with photos of the artist’s androgynous face coyly eating a banana. She openly mocks the revered phallus, in the process smashing the “prestige art” normatives of sculpted breasts, pretty vaginas, and curvaceous bodies—these, so often formed by idealistic men, the same ones who constructed alien expectations of the female form. (How the fuck did that happen?)

Chicken Knickers

You don’t see erect penises everywhere, so that makes it more impactful, which also has the effect of being a whole other level of commentary on why is male sexuality so guarded compared to female sexuality and why are women’s bodies clearly considered so much cheaper — because they are everywhere. —J

Sarah Lucas lampoons the absurdity of mainstream assumptions about sexuality and gender stereotypes with the same give-a-shit attitude she’s displayed since the 90s. It’s the same brash naiveté she flaunted while creating shows and partying with Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin and the rest of the Young British Artists, back when Millennials were still baby-faced. She splatters sex and expectations and reality with jet-black wit and stark bare boner-ness (Lucasian pun intended) and dares to take it all not so seriously. “It’s really just serendipity most of the time,” Lucas told Eileen Kinsella of artnet. “I think often deeper meanings tend to slip in—more in a Freudian slip sort of way. I’m always in a cloud of emotions and reading a lot, but I don’t directly try to put that into things. It’s more that there is a cloud of awareness. Different people might pick up different things according to their own cloud.” She is not afraid to use mundane, daily objects and perishable food to recreate societal and cultural practice or objectify the body so literally one has to laugh.

Catharsis.

Edible feminism, consumptive sexuality, and concrete shit-kickers to boot? It dares us to giggle, to indulge (or not), to be annoyed, to want to throw it in the trash.

I don’t know what they’re trying to get at and why they have to be so obtuse as to what they are communicating. —F

It’s intentionally vague to allow people to project onto it whatever they have going on. It’s not making a comment; it’s inviting comment. —J

They make me laugh! Pure joy. —P

Her work reminds me of going to therapy last year. Those sessions put me back on my feet when I felt like they were slipping out from under me. Slipping on the leftover mucus of eggshells. I was attending therapy (to grossly oversimplify) because I was sick of shrinking myself and my body, of walking on eggshells around people—specifically men. Life had taught me it was best to tiptoe around males in authoritative positions so that “who I am is constantly precluded to make room for someone else’s fragility.” That’s the way my friend put it one evening in a coffee shop, so succinct that I burst into tears, head drooping over my Americano. It was true. The eggshells were slippery and delicate and my legs were exhausted with restraint. With constriction.

Bunny Gets Snookered

Reasons to make a penis: appropriation, because I don’t have one; voodoo economics; totemism; they’re a convenient size for the lap; fetishism; compact power; Dad; why make the whole bloke?; gents; gnomes; because you don’t see them on display very much; for religious reasons having to do with the spark.‍—Sarah Lucas in conversation with Vanessa Fristedt, in Sarah Lucas: After 2005, Before 2012 (London: Koenig Books/Sadie Coles HQ), 51

I hate myself like that. I hate being less of me, less of my own opinion, less of my own decisions in order to fit the bill of the man in the room. How to unwind my deference: wear heavier shoes and eat hard-boiled eggs for breakfast? No. Learn to love crunching sounds. Learn to love shaking in my boots while my opinions and decisions fill the space around me.

It makes me think about people who don’t give a fuck about the patriarchy but love men and love sex and love pleasure. —M

It makes me feel kind of mad at it because it’s vulgar and it doesn’t depict the real sensuality of what would be going on. —S

Objectified. Dirty but also honest. In a sad way. It’s raw. —E

For the first time, Sarah Lucas’ work has its own show in North America—Au Naturel, at the New Museum in New York. So why has Sarah Lucas been making giant sculptures of penises and juxtaposing bucket vaginas with cucumber cocks? And why does one of her installations involve a live audience throwing eggs at a blank wall to symbolize the female orgasm? Perhaps because it’s time for us in North America to take real notice.

Seeing this in a gallery—early-to-mid-twenties me—I would be very uncomfortable. Because I was a lot more repressed and embarrassed by sexuality. —J

To me this thing is a symbol for the structure of man that has been built up but, peeled away, is really absurd and meaningless. —M

I feel like I wanna clean it up. The lack of context makes it weird. —R

Jubliee

Imagine… Being there as clusters of people throw raw eggs against a wall... Imagine all the symbolic female Os erupting in one room! Imagine all the eggshells cast upon the floor in exploded ecstasy...

I bet Sarah Lucas doesn’t walk on them. I bet she puts her eight-foot-tall concrete boots to work and crushes those eggshells with every fucking step.